Our Mead

Learn What Makes Kinsale Mead

Our Meads

Atlantic Dry Mead

A traditional mead, made from raw Spanish orange blossom honey, fermented and matured to finish at 12% ABV, off dry with lovely floral, citrus aroma, a long lingering hint of honey and almost no sweetness.

Our mead is handcrafted in West Cork in our meadery in Barrack Lane in Kinsale (close to the site of the 1601 Battle of Kinsale). Each batch is carefully mixed, fermented and matured with care and passion and attention to quality.

Mead’s primary ingredient is honey, collected from diverse botanical sources by nature’s amazing workers, honeybees. It takes about four million visits to flowers to make one kilo of honey and those bees will cover 200,000 kilometres. Kinsale and Spain have had close maritime links for centuries and our honey for our Atlantic Dry Mead comes from Spain along those same trade routes.

Our water comes from Innishannon (Inis Eonáin) upriver from Kinsale along the beautiful meandering river Bandon which rises in the Shehy Mountains. We like to think our water gets infused with the salty air of the Wild Atlantic, especially after a winter storm has blown over.

Fruits: Our Wild Red Mead and our Hazy Summer Mead are Melomel style meads where fruit is added to the honey. Our blackcurrants come from Ballykelly Farm in Wexford, home of the famous Jeffares blackcurrants. We bag our solid fruit in fine mesh bags with about 400Kg of fruit in one of our 1000L fermentation tanks – that’s a lot of blackcurrants and red fingers.

Our honey and fruit is mixed with local water and yeast is added and then we sit back and let nature and time turn the honey and fruit into our delicious mead. We bring it to an alcohol level of about 12% and a low residual sugar level that retains the aromas and flavours of the honey.

Our process is a blend of earlier mead making recipes and modern techniques and equipment. Our meads ferment in about 3-5 weeks, then we let them mature for at least six months. We sample regularly their slowly changing aromas and flavours until they are ready for us to bottle.

We were thrilled to win agold award in the special choice category at the Free From Food Awards for our meads which are naturally gluten free.